Everything You Need To Know About Thom Yorke’s Surprise BitTorrent Album

1. Good morning! Here’s a new album from Thom Yorke, Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes.

2. Watch the video for single “A Brain in a Bottle” below.

3. The album was made available digitally this morning for $6 via BitTorrent Bundle, an approach that cuts out the middle man (i.e. a record label) and allows Yorke to profit directly from his work. Here’s what he had to say in a statement:

It’s an experiment to see if the mechanics of the system are something that the general public can get its head around… If it works well, it could be an effective way of handing some control of internet commerce back to the people who are creating the work…enabling those people who make either music, video or any other kind of digital content to sell it themselves.

4.Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes was produced by longtime Yorke collaborator Nigel Godrich. The mercurial artist had teased new music recently, though many suspected it was a new Radiohead album. Here’s the tracklist for Boxes, Yorke’s first solo LP since 2006.

SIDE A
a brain in a bottle
guess again!
interference
the mother lode

SIDE B
truth ray
there is no ice (for my drink)
pink section
nose grows some

A deluxe vinyl version of the album, with high quality digital files, is also available for 30£ at a dedicated website.

5. Yorke, of course, has a history of non-traditional album rollouts. With Radiohead, he unveiled the famous “pay-what-you-want” scheme for surprise 2007 album, In Rainbows. In 2011, The King of Limbs was released as the world’s first “newspaper album.”